This symposium explores German, Finnish and Australian pre-service teachers’ and teachers’ understanding of diversity, culture, and change, and the capabilities of these professionals to act in conditions of ‘superdiversity’. The topic is timely and a global lens justified, as all these contexts are experiencing rapid societal and cultural changes, but there are also stark differences between them. Moreover, in all these contexts, the publicly announced aim of teacher education is to equip future teachers with competences to foster social change towards greater sustainability and social justice.

The theoretical framework of this symposium is global education. According to Maastricht Declaration (2002), global education “opens people’s eyes and minds to the realities of the world, and awakens them to bring about a world of greater justice, equity and human rights for all” (see also Nygaard & Wegimont, 2018; Scheunpflug, 2021). With closely related concepts such as intercultural education, multicultural education, global citizenship education and worldview education, global education seeks educational responses to global issues and highlighting our global responsibility in the world (Scheunpflug, 2021).

In global education, knowledge of diversity, cultures, and our place in the world are central, while also interconnected and intersecting. The attention to the global dimensions of relationality shifts the focus away from any single phenomena, for example, the increasing migration, towards the complexity and contingency of human relations, and their links with the temporal, spatial, factual and social dimensions. Diversity is seen as a multifaceted condition with the levels of individual (dimensions such as gender, ethnicity, age or background), group (everyday belongings) and world society, in which belongings are abstract (cf. Hirschauer, 2014). Finally, culture is seen as shaped by the meaning-making of people as well as the arrangements of the society and as fluid, with past, present and future coinciding in temporal terms. Social continuity is maintained through tradition (past - present) whereas the perceived demands of the future are met through adaptations and modifications (present - future). 

Professional beliefs of teachers, be they implicit or explicit, are important predictors of teachers' behaviour and their capabilities to act (Baumert & Kunter, 2006; Shulman, 2006). Teachers’ implicit understandings prefigure their practices, which in turn impact, for example, how students can be steered to overcome stereotypes and increase understanding about the plurality of normative horizons.  

In this symposium, we present Finnish, German pre-service teachers’ and Australian teachers’ views of their roles as global educators. Each paper employs a distinct methodological approach: The first draws on group discussions and documentary analysis (Bohnsack, 2010) within a qualitative paradigm; the second reports the findings of a large-scale survey using descriptive analysis, multi group latent profile analysis and analyses of variance, and the third paper explores the opportunities that in-service teachers have to achieve a socially just education in Australia. The Finnish and the German studies are part of research funded by the Global Education Award 2021 (Stream A).

Taken together, the papers answer these questions:

1. How do preservice teachers understand diversity, culture, and change?

2. How do these understandings shape preservice teachers’ pedagogical praxis?

3. How are teachers’ patterns of knowledge formed by their specific contexts?

4. How can teacher education build on those understandings?

5. What opportunities do teachers in schools have to achieve a socially just education, considering their personal, social and institutional conversion factors? 

By bringing these studies together, we gain a deeper understanding of the beliefs and orientations of pre-service teachers in regard to change and uncertainty, in particular when working in multicultural educational contexts. 

Baumert, J., & Kunter, M. (2006). Stichwort: Professionelle Kompetenz von Lehrkräften. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 9(4), 469-519. Bohnsack, R. (2010). Documentary method and group discussions. In R. Bohnsack, N. Pfaff, & W. Weller (eds.), Qualitative analysis and documentary method in international educational research (S. 99-124). Barbara Budrich. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-317339 Hirschauer, S. (2014). Un/doing Differences. Die Kontingenz sozialer Zugehörigkeiten. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 43(3), 170-191. Maastricht Global Education Declaration (2002). A European Strategy Framework for Improving and Increasing Global Education in Europe to the Year 2015. Dublin: GENE. Nygaard, A., & Wegimont, L. (2018). Global Education in Europe: Concepts, Definitions and Aims. Dublin: GENE. Scheunpflug, A. (2021). Global learning: Educational research in an emerging field. European Education Research Journal, 20(1), 3-13. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1177/1474904120951743. Shulman, L. S. (2006). The Wisdom of Practice. Essays on teaching, learning, and learning to teach.